Monday, June 11, 2012

Buy direct, cut out the middleman, save $

"Athens, Greece - When an economy shrinks, prices are
meant to go down in response to falling demand. This has not happened in
Greece - at least not yet. While the Greek economy shrank by an average
of five per cent a year between 2009 and 2011, consumer prices rose by
an average 3.7 per cent a year. The combination of falling revenues and
rising prices has led to an explosive political mix."
"The potato movement is giving renewed impetus to two institutions
that could have been expected to channel market economics in hard times
but didn't. The first, farmers' cooperatives, were set up in the 1980s
to give producers the clout to compete with wholesalers. 'Cooperatives
have the ability to sweep wholesalers aside, but they don't sell any
cheaper,' Kamenidis said. 'They mark up produce even more.'
Farmers' markets, set up throughout Greece to help producers compete
with retailers, also reportedly fall prey to the same greed. "Producers
have succumbed to the logic of the market. They are trying to gouge
consumers in the same way as middlemen," Ilias Tsolakidis, who created
the Pieria group in Katerini, told Al Jazeera."

So the idea is for farmers to sell directly to consumers. This idea is actually older than our current system, of course. Or you just grow your own food, which is time consuming but even better. If the farmers get greedy, find a work-around for that too. Way to go Greece!